, 2 min read
Science and Technology links (February 24th, 2018)
- Samsung is manufacturing and will sell 30TB hard drives. That’s huge. It is enough to record everything you see and hear for three years.- Of the cases of early-onset dementia, most were either alcohol-related or had an additional diagnosis of alcohol use disorders.
- Amazon’s CEO is funding a clock that should run unattended for 10,000 years. I have no idea how you make any kind of mechanical device last 100 years… so this seems like quite an ambitious project.
- Kids who receive Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity medication can grow up to be slightly shorter than they would have been. I’m not very tall myself and I have never felt bad about my moderate height. I am told that I would get more respect, more women, and more money if I were taller.- Some believe that Alzheimer’s is caused by the accumulation of amyloid plaques (whatever that is) in the brain. It seems that this only happens with the participation of the BACE1 gene. Deleting this gene, in mice, cures the brain from the amyloid plaques and seems to reverse the mice-equivalent of Alzheimer’s. In human beings, I guess we could try to find a way to silence the gene.
- People with Huntington’s disease are much less likely to suffer from cancer. This has been known for some time already (through population statistics). It seems that we have finally figured out why: people suffering from Huntington’s disease have a gene that leads to the production of a variant of the Huntingtin protein which is highly toxic to cancer. This could be used to create new cancer therapies. Though you do not want to have your body filled with this problematic protein, if you could inject it at cancer sites, it would probably do more good than bad.